Adrian Barnes Quotes & Sayings

I think now that if all eight billion of us had just shut off the lights and gone to bed that night and left it alone we'd have all slept and the chalice would have passed us by. But let's be real. Whoever leaves anything alone? Life's a scab, and it's our nature to pick at it until it bleeds. — Adrian Barnes

What we can't change has to be a church', Paul. Get it? — Adrian Barnes

The object of words is to conceal thoughts. — Adrian Barnes

And speaking of Escher, it's worth recording this for posterity: the artists were right, literally right, all along. Beneath what we used to call 'reality' there was always an Escheresque, a Boschian, a Munchian fact - a scuttling Guernicopia of horrors just waiting to be discovered once the civilizational rock was finally overturned. — Adrian Barnes

I said,'What's your problem?' Asshole." There was a question behind his question, and that shadow question was 'Do you want to dance? — Adrian Barnes

To use the old jailhouse term and not the modern rock and roll one, a punk's question. — Adrian Barnes

Love a lie. But a real lie, a true lie. — Adrian Barnes

Hell is time, isn't that obvious? Take your greatest pleasure or your greatest fantasy and let it come continuously true - for a day, a week, a year, a decade. And that's hell. — Adrian Barnes

Every day is important; each day make us. Even the nothing ones especially those, given how they slit up, slowly burying other, seemingly more momentous, moments beneath their weight. I see that now. — Adrian Barnes

While my lack of enthusiasm kept the bulk of humanity at arm's length, it almost seemed to attract people like Charles. Maybe it's the fact that we misanthropes don't discriminate - the people hater hates everybody equally. Maybe this sad sack egalitarianism makes the Charleses of the world, used as they are to being dismissed out of hand, feel raised to uncommon heights of social desirability when bathed in its jaundiced glow. — Adrian Barnes

There's a natural point in the development of any religion where the prophet becomes first a nuisance and then a positive liability. Just imagine Jesus walking into an evangelical church while the collection plate was being passed around — Adrian Barnes

that the reason we know others exist is because when they look at us, we feel looked at. He called the entity that was staring back at us the Other. — Adrian Barnes

I could pull off a 'man', but never, quite, a 'dude'. — Adrian Barnes

Children are the eternal, silent witnesses to every human sin. — Adrian Barnes

If, during any one of a million previous nights, a giant asteroid had smashed the Earth into gravel while we all slept, would it have mattered? With no one left to mourn the wreckage, one could even argue that it wouldn't be a bad way to end things at all: egalitarian if nothing else. I even thought of a scene in Star Wars where Princess Leia receives news that her home world has been destroyed by Darth Vader's Death Star. She throws a hairy fit, but two scenes later, she's back to flirting with Han Solo. — Adrian Barnes

In sleep we all die, every one of us, every day. Why wasn't that fact noted more often? When we doze off each night there's never the slightest guarantee that we'll wake the next morning. Every little cat nap is a potential game-ender. So why fear death when we are happy and even eager to make that leap of faith each and every night of our lives? — Adrian Barnes

There was more than safety in Charles' numbers: there was consensus, there was culture, there was reality. — Adrian Barnes

-but deep inside we know that we are, each of us, unknowable and ultimately alone, even when we love. — Adrian Barnes

Nobody says these things - it's against the rules - but deep inside we know that we are, each of us, unknowable and ultimately alone, even when we love. Most — Adrian Barnes

The world is a gawking four-year-old. — Adrian Barnes

There is a point of obesity where, like it or not, whatever your other personal achievements or qualities, all you are is "the fat man" or "the fat lady", The world is a gawking four-year old. — Adrian Barnes

And even if I'd wanted to mourn, four or five million were too many to shed tears over. Tears are more personal than that. We don;t read a news story about twenty thousand dead in an earthquake and weep. at best, we sigh and tell the wife. More often, we shrug and go check our Facebook messages. — Adrian Barnes

And we weren't a species interested in facts, as such. We were more into evading or spinning them. — Adrian Barnes

Someone once said that we get more difficult to love with each passing year because, over time, our histories grow so tangled that newcomers can no longer bushwhack their way into the thicketed and overgrown depths of our hearts. — Adrian Barnes

That's what you do when you run out of options: you go home. — Adrian Barnes

What we used to blithely call 'wasting time' was actually a euphemism for the tenement architecture of our lives; there wasn't an ounce of waste in a ton of those lost hours. Proof of this could be seen in the fact that even as we imagined we were killing time with movies and phone calls, careers and frozen pizzas, time was slowly but surely killing us. But who knew? It — Adrian Barnes

But as it turns out, love doesn't set us free - love keeps standing outside the jail on an endless candlelight vigil. So love? Yes, love was pain as well. Especially love. — Adrian Barnes